Discover ways to monitor, analyse and cut unnecessary AWS spend with built-in cost management features.
As businesses increasingly migrate to the cloud, managing costs can quickly become a challenge. Without the right visibility and control, monthly bills can spiral, especially in complex environments with multiple services and fluctuating workloads.
Fortunately, Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a range of built-in tools that help organisations monitor, analyse, and optimise costs effectively. In this guide, we’ll explore how to use these AWS optimisation tools to cut unnecessary spend and improve cloud efficiency, while maintaining the performance your business depends on.
In this article, we’ll cover
- Identify where AWS costs come from and how to manage them.
- Learn about the top AWS cost optimisation tools.
- Discover how to automate reporting and gain real-time usage insights.
- Understand how Cyberdan helps businesses achieve smarter cloud cost management.
1. Understand Where Your AWS Spend Comes From
Before you can reduce cloud costs, you need a clear picture of how your money is being spent. AWS provides a comprehensive suite of built-in tools to help you track, analyse, and forecast your billing data across multiple services and accounts.
Start with:
- AWS Cost Explorer: Visualise spending patterns and identify which services or regions are driving the highest costs. You can filter by linked accounts, usage type, or time period to uncover trends and anomalies.
- AWS Budgets: Set custom budgets for cost, usage, or reserved instance coverage. Configure alerts to notify you before you exceed your planned spend, giving you proactive control rather than reactive surprises.
- AWS Billing Dashboard: Provides a single, consolidated view of your entire AWS account structure, ideal for businesses using multi-account setups through AWS Organisations.
Tip: Use AWS Cost Explorer’s “Right-sizing Recommendations” to identify underutilised instances and scale them down or switch to more cost-efficient instance families.
Cyberdan Advice: Combine Cost Explorer data with custom usage analytics dashboards to correlate spend with business KPIs, giving decision-makers financial and operational clarity in one view.
2. Use AWS Trusted Advisor for Real-Time Optimisation
AWS Trusted Advisor acts like an automated consultant, scanning your environment in real time to find opportunities for cost savings, performance improvements, and security enhancements.
Key cost optimisation features include:
- Identifying idle or low-utilisation EC2 instances that can be stopped or resized.
- Recommending Savings Plan or Reserved Instance purchases based on your usage history.
- Highlighting underused load balancers, unattached EBS volumes, and idle Elastic IPs that add hidden costs.
- Checking S3 bucket configurations to ensure data is stored in the most cost-effective storage class.
Cyberdan Insight:
Our AWS specialists review Trusted Advisor’s recommendations as part of a proactive monthly optimisation cycle, ensuring that any identified savings are implemented swiftly without compromising uptime or compliance.
3. Automate Savings with AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances
If your workloads are predictable, AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances (RIs) are two of the most powerful cost-saving mechanisms available, offering up to 72% savings compared to on-demand pricing.
Best practice:
- Use Compute Savings Plans for flexible workloads that might change instance families or regions over time.
- Use EC2 Reserved Instances for steady-state workloads like databases, application servers, or production web servers.
- Combine Savings Plans with AWS Cost Anomaly Detection to monitor and forecast spending fluctuations.
- Review your commitments every 6–12 months to ensure they still match your usage profile.
Cyberdan Tip:
We analyse your historical usage data to model the right mix of on-demand, reserved, and spot instances, ensuring consistent performance while avoiding overcommitment or unused reservations.
4. Optimise Data Storage with S3 and Lifecycle Policies
Storage can account for a significant portion of your AWS bill, often due to redundant backups, outdated logs, or unoptimised retention policies. AWS provides powerful automation tools to help manage and reduce these costs effectively.
How to save:
- Move infrequently accessed data to S3 Infrequent Access (IA) or Glacier tiers to benefit from lower storage rates.
- Use S3 Intelligent-Tiering, which automatically moves objects between access tiers based on usage.
- Implement S3 Lifecycle Policies to automatically delete or archive objects after a defined period.
- Analyse storage patterns with S3 Storage Lens to gain visibility into object growth, access frequency, and data replication efficiency.
- Regularly review and clean up old object versions if versioning is enabled, especially in high-turnover buckets.
Pro Tip: Even small adjustments, like moving aged logs or infrequent backups to Glacier, can result in double-digit percentage savings over time.Cyberdan Support: We design automated S3 lifecycle frameworks to ensure compliance retention policies are met while minimising unnecessary storage costs.
5. Gain Insights Through Usage Analytics
Visibility is the cornerstone of effective cloud cost management. Analysing your AWS usage data helps you pinpoint inefficiencies, track spending trends, and make informed decisions about scaling and budgeting.
Useful tools:
- AWS CloudWatch: Monitor CPU, memory, and I/O usage across services. Use custom metrics to identify underperforming resources or idle workloads.
- AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR): Provides granular, per-service cost data that can be exported to Amazon Athena or QuickSight for deeper analysis.
- AWS QuickSight: Enables interactive dashboards that visualise spending trends, cost anomalies, and usage forecasts for executive reporting.
- AWS Cost Anomaly Detection: Uses machine learning to automatically flag unexpected spending changes.
Cyberdan Example:
We integrate usage analytics and financial metrics into unified dashboards, allowing clients to view cost performance in real time, aligning IT operations with financial goals and budget planning.
6. Leverage Cyberdan’s Cloud Cost Optimisation Expertise
Reducing AWS spend isn’t just about using the right tools, it’s about developing a strategic optimisation framework that combines automation, analytics, and ongoing improvement.
At Cyberdan, we take a holistic approach to AWS optimisation, ensuring your cloud infrastructure delivers maximum value without overspending.
Our AWS optimisation services include:
- Comprehensive cost auditing and multi-account billing reviews
- Resource right-sizing and workload balancing based on historical usage trends
- Automated cost alerts and anomaly detection for real-time spend control
- Continuous monitoring and governance to ensure sustained savings over time
- Strategic forecasting and budget planning aligned with business growth
Cyberdan Advantage:
Our team of certified AWS engineers and cloud cost specialists deliver ongoing support that combines technical tuning with financial insight, helping UK businesses maintain high performance at the lowest possible cost.
Smarter Cloud Management Starts Here
Effective AWS optimisation requires ongoing monitoring, insight, and action. By making full use of AWS cloud cost optimisation tools, you can eliminate waste, improve resource utilisation, and free up budget for innovation.
If you’re ready to take control of your AWS spend, Cyberdan can help you build a cloud cost management strategy tailored to your business.
Ready to reduce your AWS costs?
Contact Cyberdan today to schedule a cloud cost optimisation consultation and start saving.
